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Can science save its soul?: Some scientists have begun to talk confidently about understanding God and creation. They are crediting science with power it doesn’t possess

By MARY MIDGLEY

Cosmology is bringing us closer to the mind of God, wrote Stephen Hawking
in his celebrated book A Brief History of Time. But in recent months the
pressing issue has been what such statements reveal about the mind of science
– as is evident from the rash of books and newspaper articles questioning
the cultural ascendancy and function of science.

Why this sudden excitement? The immediate debate has been triggered
by the increasingly strident claims of cosmologists that they are close
to understanding creation and providing a ‘theory of everything’. These
claims have put the cat among the pigeons in sacred quarters. From the recent
exchanges in the British press between Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist
and avowed atheist, and John Habgood, the Archbishop of York, it seems that
some commentators want to go back a century for one more game of Evolutionists
versus Creationists.

But many debaters are already complaining that their regular opponents
aren’t available. The reason is simple: what we now have is a new set of
problems, problems that belong primarily to science and would still arise
even if religion was magically removed from the scene. Indeed, that removal
might make things still harder, for it would create a vacuum which science
would instinctively, but inappropriately, attempt to fill.

At issue is not merely what cosmology can – or cannot – say about creation
(or the mind of God), but the excessive claims that scientists and others
have made about the scope and capacity of science as a whole. The doctrine
of ‘scientism’ – with its implied belief in the omnicompetence of science
– has been steadily gaining ground in our culture throughout this …